Comms Business Magazine (CBM): What exactly is CityFibre’s new carrier & national team?
Martin Pedler (MB): "As the UK's third digital infrastructure platform, our city networks unlock the potential to create your own differentiated value with the best product at the best price, unhindered by the constraints of legacy networks. CityFibre has always had a ‘carrier’ team as such but we now sit more firmly within the wholesale commercial team, working alongside my colleagues in the regional partner and business partner teams to ensure harmony across the whole channel ecosystem we currently serve we currently serve.
"The carrier & national team comprises of our business development manager, Nick Gray, who has over 6 years’ experience across a variety of sales roles in CityFibre; account manager, Matt Dyke who has worked in the wholesale team for almost 3 years; and myself, with more than 20 years industry experience.
"Our team looks after some of our biggest wholesale relationships, working with large national partners that deliver our cost effective and innovative Ethernet solutions to their own channel of partners across the UK; and delivering services such as dark fibre to some of the UK’s biggest carriers and ISPs."
CBM: Why is CityFibre different and what can you offer to your wholesale partners?
MB: "We’re currently building our own future proof, full fibre infrastructure and we have already identified 62 towns and cities to benefit from its rollout, with plans to extend the project to more than 100 towns and cities across the UK by 2025. We don’t have to protect legacy assets while building new ones, enabling us to build innovatively and unhindered by past investment.
"By partnering with us, our carrier and national aggregator partners can significantly expand their network footprint and deliver cost effective full fibre solutions through their channel partners. In essence we’re their best option for differentiating and extending their network proposition where their own coverage needs development or is limited to incumbent choice. Our infrastructure strategy makes their investment on our network justifiable and competitive.
"We provide a number of connection methods for our wholesale partners to serve their customers in our cities. Whether they’re an ISP, a carrier or national partner we have an Ethernet access solution to meet their needs. That can be deep access within our fibre exchanges or aggregated access on a national ENNI.
"Local networks are seeing an ever-increasing volume of data traffic as businesses demand more bandwidth to support application access. Our passive dark fibre solutions are a great alternative to optical access solutions currently available, providing our partners the ability to disaggregate cost from bandwidth and provide security and take control of their backhaul for future growth."
CBM: Why is full fibre so important for the channel?
MB: "Aside from the obvious financial benefits to business customers in terms of productivity and efficiency improvement and the proven positive economic impact to local communities, full fibre provides partners throughout the channel ecosystem the ability to address the demands of a shifting, growing, market as customers look to migrate from older technologies that are no longer capable of meeting their operational needs.
"You could even go as far as saying to bolster the recovery of the UK economy. If we can all take one thing away from 2020, it would be that full fibre is undoubtedly the future of the UK’s digital infrastructure and this year has shown more than ever how critically important it is to our economic future."
CBM: How are you supporting carriers and national partners to transition to full fibre?
MB: "Due to the fact that we build and operate our own infrastructure, we already provide consistently good value and can control the high quality of our solutions to ensure reliability and support future growth. As our network footprint expands, so do the ever-increasing opportunities for our carrier and national partners.
"But we also focus on supporting our partners in other ways. From launching popular sales promotions throughout the pandemic, to supporting the NHSx care home initiative, and offering individual marketing support – we work alongside our partners throughout the wholesale ecosystem to ensure we provide them with everything they need to succeed in the supply of business critical full fibre connectivity. Marketing CityFibre solutions to their own channel of partners, we can provide co-branded marketing collateral, campaign support, advice and guidance as well as dedicated account management and innovative, high quality solutions. Supporting our partners is and continues to be at the core of what we do."
CBM: What can we expect in 2021 and beyond?
MB: "Our network build continues at pace, this represents a massive opportunity for all wholesale partners, but especially enables national partners to dramatically increase their ability to serve their own partners' potential customer base and carriers to significantly expand their network footprint unhindered by the constraints of undifferentiated legacy networks.
"Our partners are fully invested in our full fibre journey and are dedicated to maximising the benefits of full fibre to their customers by adding CityFibre’s infrastructure and services to their offerings. Key for our partners is our open access, wholesale-only strategy that fully supports a fair engagement across the wholesale partner community. 2021 will be a great year as our existing and new partners scale their operations with us."